Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday September 06, 2004 @09:29AM
from the moving-into-COTS dept.

keeleysam writes "c|net news.com is reporting that Alienware is going to ship a 4GHz desktop. The new Area-51 ALX, introduced on Friday, uses overclocking, or the practice of pushing a processor past its factory speed setting, to elevate a standard Intel Pentium 4 chip to 4GHz. Because overclocking a processor can cause it to overheat, the desktop also includes a special liquid-cooling system devised by Alienware. Purchasing the 4GHz Area-51 ALX desktop is an expensive proposition for most consumers, as the machine starts at about $4,200, according to pricing on Alienware's ALX Web site."

OC'ing a P4 to 4 ghz isn't likely to result in any noticable difference... If you're a gamer (like me), a 2 ghz+ machine works just fine, slow-downs are generally caused by graphics card/memory issues... If you do a lot of multi-tasking you're better off spending the money on a dual processor system that has 15k rpm scsis, I assure you if you do this you will see a very noticable difference. I also noticed that alienware is using a raid 0 SATA configuration -- that's just downright stupid considering the d

glad we got a definition of overclocking. i always thought overclocking was moving my clock ahead fifteen minutes so i could get places on time. but when i figured out i had an extra fifteen minutes, i just hit snooze. then i was late again. shit. so much for overclocking.

i did the same, except i would push it even further once i got used to the current overclocking increment.
i'm not currently 10 years ahead of myself, but there are advantages, apparently longhorn is finally going to ship anytime soon... no seriously.

Well, in all seriousness, the reason they give that definition of overclocking is because the PR people who made this press release want to be sure that all the kiddies who THINK they're cool computer geeks who know computers, don't know a damn thing, but have lots of disposable income (ie. parents who spoil), will understand that "this is a good excuse to charge more for it because you get the most TOP OF THE LINE XTREME GAMING MACHINE THAT THE WORLD HAS TODAY!!!! DUDE!!!!

And yes, I say this as I type from my brand new Alienware. The trick is, they make solid machines still (they always did, thats how they got started), but you completely overpay for the gaming case, so get a "home office" setup instead. Its a helluva lot cheaper with the same components, and a Dragon case instead of a custom one so its easier to work with.

And before some troll posts something along the lines of "well, real computer geeks BUILD their computers", I respond, "I'd get more money than I'd save if I build my own by working, and I don't really have freetime for it. But rest assured, I've built my own before, and its not THAT exciting."

Also, you don't really save THAT much money. (and all of it can be eaten up by shipping if you're buying parts from multiple vendors) The only way you're going to be saving enough to make it look like a winning proposition is if you're comparing it to a vendor like Alienware, who charge a premium for at least one of two things...exotic configurations hardly anyone uses; or the name on the box.

Go with a beige-box type retailer (who usually have boxes other than beige these days) and you'll be paying like

the reason they give that definition of overclocking is because the PR people who made this press release...

Just curious, but did you notice that the description of overclocking was part of the submitter's description of the story? Supposedly this isn't a press release. But looking back at the history for the submitter, keeleysam [slashdot.org], it looks like the account is less than 2 weeks old. Perhaps created simply as a dummy by slashdot in order to post this paid-placement advertorial.

I can understand not wanting to go through the hassle of building one's own machine, but why buy from an overpriced joke like Alienware? iBuyPower [ibuypower.com] makes similarly spec'd machines (well, aside from the the overclocking) for waaay better prices.

My 0.02.

Full Disclaimer: My only connection to IBP is that I purchased one of their E-Series laptops several monthes ago, and have been very impressed.

I have always wanted to try out liquid cooling in my gaming PCs, but am petrified of bringing the box out of the house to a friends house for gaming sessions. Alienware usually puts together a pretty good package for it's customers, but reading the site doesn't give me any insight on its portability. My geeky friends feel the same way as I do - an article or study showing that the integrity of the cooling system remains after traveling with it would go a long way towards me taking the plunge, as it were. (By normal traveling I mean putting it safely in your car, securing it, and setting it back up, not waching it into a wall or some other moronic stress test.)

an article or study showing that the integrity of the cooling system remains after traveling with it would go a long way towards me taking the plunge, as it were.

That's a pretty dumb idea, and it's not going to happen for the same reason that other manufacturers don't advertise the portability of *desktop* systems. Why should they widen their product guarantees just because you want to lug it around in the back of a pickup? If you're smart enough to network surely you're smart enough not to f$ck up your new alienware box while travelling.

Most people know Alienware is quite overpriced, but $4,200! I know you're paying for the aesthetics more than anything but still, if you want that power then buy two 2GHZ boxes and save yourself $2000, I can't imagine Alienware would have many people 'in the know' purchasing their hardware.

I think this is more of a gimmick for advertising (seen by the fact it's on/. and now about 100 other news sites) than anything else.

I am curious why other systems manufacturers like Dell, Compaq, or Hewlett Packard, do not overclock their products. I would expect that, with all of the setup time they already devote to their products, they would be able to click a few more times in the BIOS as well. Not to trivialize the process, but with the consistency granted by producing the same computer repeatedly, that is all that would be required.

These systems could then be sold at slightly elevated prices. The script-kiddie crowd would lunge at them, buying into a piece of the OC'ing action. The naive would purchase them for the in-between performance levels they would have. The rest would build their own computer and do it themselves. But, in the mean time, those companies get to gouge good customers - all while making them feel that their purchase was personalized.

I am curious why other systems manufacturers like Dell, Compaq, or Hewlett Packard, do not overclock their products

Because many of those maufacturers thrive by the "low prices, high volumes" concept.

Overclocking enough to notice, and without losing to much stability, requires quality components, careful tweaking of hardware, BIOS and software configuration. The first thing a normal user would do, is install some stupid proggie that interferes with that careful tweaked system, and cause helpdesk headache

CPUs are speed binned by the manufacturer based on rigourous tests done in worst-case conditions (highest allowed temperature, lowest voltage).

There are 3 things that let you overclock in normal situations:1. If the CPU works at 2.99GHz, but not 3.0GHz, it has to be sold as one speed grade down. This CPU would be perfectly stable up to 2.99GHz.2. If the environment you run in is not in the worst-case corner (you keep it cool, with good power supplied to the CPU), you'll be able to get a few extra percent.3. When the manufacturer tests the CPU, they know all the worst-case instruction sequences and critical paths. When an overclocker does a stability test, it's extremely likely that they're missing various speed paths, and eventually something WILL use one of those paths, and you get data corruption. Using games as tests and seeing if they crash is absolutely not thorough - if every floating point operation was coming out slightly incorrect, you probably wouldn't notice, but the CPU is in fact not operating properly. Why is it that overclockers with "perfectly stable" overclocks always seem to end up having more apps crashing / more problems with "Windows sucking"?

If an OEM wants to sell a reliable machine, they'd have to do all the testing the CPU manufacturer does - the only thing they could do is guarantee a better max temperature/minimum voltage, but why bother? They're likely to gain at best 5% performance for significantly more effort.

Would anyone please tell me why it is necessary to spend 5 grand on a PC?

Okay okay -- especially when XBOX and many other consoles approach PC graphics? This is overkill -- the amount of money spent on this one machine could be used to build a small cluster of less powerful machines.

It is a shame that XBOX, a $300 dollar system can get amazing games -- but if you want amazing graphics and sound on the PC you must spend 5 g's.

As far as I understand it, the problem is that cache tends to have problems when you manufacture it. So the more cache you build in, the higher the chance that it will be broken, and they'll have to throw the whole chip away.

I would not jump to the conclusion that the 3.8GHz with 2mb cache is faster than the 4GHz P4 with 1mb of cache.

Yeah I'm aware of the "MHz myth," but look at the benchmarks [tomshardware.com] please. At 3.4GHz, the "Extreme" edition bests the 3.4GHz 1MB cache version by a whopping 1.4%. Meanwhile the Non-Extreme 3.4 beats the Extreme 3.2 by over double that amount! Both are marginal differences if you ask me, but price difference is truly "extreme."

Wouldn't it be alot cheaper and better to purchase a 2 processor system instead of a extremely high-priced overclocked 1 processor system?Seriously, except the "coolness" I fail to see the sense in this system.

Actually, a lot of them do. Its this thing called hyperthreading that intel introduced that caused a lot of game developers to go ahead and make their games multithread friendly so that there'd be a speed increase on northwood-Cs. I have a friend (a very rich friend) that bought a dual Xeon 3.06 ghz box for his gaming system. Looking at task manager with UT2004 up shows that at least that game has multithreading support and will use all 4 virtual processors. So will Doom3... and I imagine any game using either of those game's engines will too.

There's a difference in using all virtual processors and using all the virtual processors.

Right now every single process runnin in WinXp on my machine is using both "processors" on my 2.6ghz P4.

When I play games... the same thing. BUT... that does NOT mean that the games are actually taking advantage of the hyperthreading support - it just means that Windows is sending operations to both "processors".

The game would need to be developed specifically for use with dual cores/processors to take full advantag

Your processor speed it not the biggest bottleneck. I say high quality RAM and a high end graphics card will get you a lot more than a 4Ghz machine. This just seems like a waste of money. Seriously it's more expensive than any of Apple's computers, and that's saying something:)

Depends on the application. There are many programs that don't take advantage of a second processor. Also, there are some tasks that can only be done linearly. A second processor only helps when instructions can be done in paralel. In those cases, the only option is "Speed Speed Speed" to get better performance.

I used to overclock, but squeezing out the highest performence-per-watt is more fun these days. I read about it on silentpcreview.com and gave it a try. It turns out that Athlon 64 CPUs can usually run full speed at 1.3V (vs. 1.5V), which cuts power consumption almost in half. 1.8GHz (3000+) at 1.2V (35W max), 1.4GHz at 1V, and 1GHz at 0.85V (maybe a dozen watts) work well too. Someone with a newer CPU than I have managed 1.2GHz @ 0.875V. Use ClockGen [cpuid.com] to tweak the clock multiplier and core voltage under Windows. (Does anyone know of a Linux equivalent? 64-bit compatible?)

I watched a bit over 3 hours of DVD video on my HP zv5000z with the CPU set to 1GHz @ 0.85V before the 12-cell battery ran out. Normal screen brightness and everything.

Of course, this won't work all that well on Intel CPUs. Maybe Alienware will include a free naquada generator with their "4GHz" P4's.

The CPUspeed daemon on Linux automatically scales my CPUs voltage and frequency depending on the system load, but I use a Pentium 4 based laptop. The Transmeta Crusoe has similar capabilities.

Anyway, its completely automatic, so I don't have to do anything. However, for those that want to tweak, you can hack kernel options, or use a separate program called "Laptop Mode". Note you don't need to use laptop mode with an actual laptop. Laptop mode has great features for tweaking harddrive power save featur

Well, the surprising thing to me is that a similarly configured (but with more features) loaded 2.5 Ghz Dual G5 from Apple (with liquid cooling as well) runs about $2300 cheaper than the Alienware box.

I think a single 2.5GHz G5 should almost keep up, maybe it does keep up with a 4GHz P4 because it is the slightly less IPC efficient Prescott core. With Northwoods, 3GHz P4 was about as good as G5 GHz or Athlon64 clocked at 2GHz. that is a 1.5 IPC ratio. 2.5 GHz * 1.5 the IPC gets 3.75 GHz equivalent.

Granted, there aren't many games available for G5 systems, and Alienwa

Most games see very little performance improvement from a second CPU. Since the game is the CPU heavy process, and since the other processes running behind the scene are extremely light on the CPU... even though the second CPU runs these ultra-light processes, it makes very little difference. The bottle kneck is still one of the CPUs in your system.

So when it comes to games that run on both systems, the highest end Pentium or AMD based systems will by far out perform the highest end Mac.

...
So - they're telling us that going back to -shudder- less than $1.00 per MHz is progress???

Dude, I know there's profit incentives out there, but you can buy a serious 2 way 64 bit machine for that much which would blow that thing out of the water, even running 32 bit windows xp professional.

$1 per MHz... They must seriously be pining for the old days. Let it go, man. Just let it go...

A $4,200 WinXP machine that's been overclocked and tuned for gaming isn't going to be used for anything serious, so obviously when it comes to serious tasks it'd get it's ass handed to it. Of course, I wouldn't want to run Doom3 on a 2 way enterprise server either...

Alienware's dirty little secret is they are all marketing. My wife bought me one of their laptops last year based on their awesome marketing. After getting the run around on out of stock parts and waiting for damn near 2 months, the laptop came without SP1 installed, a virus in the windows system restore files and a faulty backlight switch.

It took over a month to get the laptop back when I sent it in to get the backlight switch fixed.

Their customer service is severly lacking. I would highly suggest you build it yourself instead of paying for Alienware's marketing department.

You can read my whole sordid tale on this topic at my website [str8dog.com] along with several other peoples comments.

Most of Alienware's notebooks are re-branded Sagers (which are made by Clevo). A couple of years ago I got a Sager from PowerNotebooks [powernotebooks.com] and a few weeks later Alienware came out with a near identical notebook (their original Area 51-M) for about $1k more. Check out this [powernotebooks.com] for more details.

I just got a new alienware, and while there were some hastles ACTUALLY BUYING IT, it works excellently. Its running amazingly, but this could just be afterglow from a new computer after living with a 1ghz 384mb RAM geforce1 64mb ddr for 5 years.

Ok, onto the story.

So I talk to the guy on the phone after creating a system on the website. Never order a computer just off a website, always speak to someone.

You have incredibly low standards as a consumer. They basically gave you the run around multiple times, lied to you about a rebate, refused fast shipping for some bogus reason and you sat there and accepted it instead of canceling your order and giving money to a company that would treat you well.

About the only thing that a single blindingly fast processor is good for is gaming. Now, the whole watercooling/Alienware thing strikes me as silly--instead of paying $2000 extra for an overclocked machine, just wait six months and Moore's Law will have caught up.

But instead of debating that, it's more informative to wonder what all those bogomips would DO in today's games.

Some people would reply: more frames per second! More varied stuff in those frames! But there's a limit to how much more graphics muscle will improve the gameplay experience in any given game (my Athlon 64 3200+/2GHz machine runs Halflife no better than my Athlon XP 1800+/1.53GHz machine), and there's also a limit to what graphics crunching can do for a game. Doom 3 may be shiny, but by all accounts you could write a game with the same gameplay as Doom 3 (but less prettiness) that would run on a P3/Geforce2.

I'm ready to see a game that really makes use of modern computers' incredible power for gameplay/AI/physics. How about a version of Homeworld with realistic trajectory modelling of every mass-driver shot, a version of NWN with *real* intelligent AI opponents, or one of a million different ideas for games whose gameplay design, in addition to their graphics, takes into account modern computers.

NWN did this -- sort of. But it took so long to release (which is a good thing!), and has been a while since release, that modern machines still get bored running its scripting/AI. Hopefully all this will be spiffed up in NWN2.

Me and some of my friends each bought Alienware computers a couple of years ago. Without fail, each of us had a horrible experience with them.

The way they assemble things is very shoddy, and they must have some sort of ESD issues at their assembly facility - we all had extremely short lifetimes on motherboards and cpus - usually measured in months.

These weren't overclocked machines that we purchased, but they were at the time AWs highest end computers.

To make things worse (much worse!) their support is horrible. It takes 3 transfers to be able to talk to anybody who knows anything about your situation when you are in the middle of a component replacement. Their "on-site" replacement means that they hire out whomever is cheapest in your area to replace the myriad of things which break on their boxes. As a bonus, they continually change who they outsource their support services too, so the quality varies a lot, but it certainly is consistent at the low end.

One more thing - if you ever even mention, that you might have, at one time, considered getting a linux installation disk anywhere near your AW box, they will instantly refuse to help in anyway, no matter how obvious the hardware problem.

When it comes to responsibility, they just want to deny, deny, deny.

Just so you know - I don't now, and never have worked for AW or any of their competitors. I'm just a very unhappy consumer of one of their crappy products. I hate them, and I don't want to see anybody else burned.

Sorry guys... link is broken... I went on the assumption that the problem with the link was the missing slash after ".com"... but I guess that wasn't it! Apparently the original poster is just an idiot.

Water-cooling, which isn't that complicated. Anyway, they're overclocking a 3.2ghz chip to 3.8, which isn't a huge increase.

Seriously, comparing it to heat problems in a notebook is pretty silly, as there simply isn't the same amount of space available for a cooling system. I know what you're saying, but the comparison is pretty shaky;)

I can't speak for this, but for the water cooling lasers I use deionized water with 20% to %40 alchol. Almost certaintly they use deionised water - otherwise you get minerals etc clogging up the pipes.

How much time before you can buy something similar for half the money? 3 months? 4? I can understand you're willing to pay more for the fastest available, but eehh.. to do what? Gaming? Get a quality motherboard, fast memory and one of the latest videocards. Much cheaper. Scientific calculations? Get a small blade server or mini-cluster, that'll better suit the job. Just to impress your friends? Get a nice looking case, do some modding, add some cool looking lights. Much more fun.

I really hope I get to meta-mod "unfair" the moderator who did this (-1 Troll??? I don't think so , +5 Funny would be fairer).. check any mac thread to see that standards aren't applied evenly aroud here.

So would you buy one if you weren't forced to get it with Windows installed?

Assuming you use Linux and nothing else, do you game a lot, since that is (usually) the primary purpose of buying an Alienware machine?

Somehow I get the feeling you're posting just so you can get in a jab at Microsoft - if you genuinely support the views you claim to, you shouldn't need to post just to basically say "Lookit me! I'm fighting The Man!"

I might think about it yeah. I don't play games no, but I quite like the cases - I like to have a fast machine because I do a lot of CPU intensive work (although dual CPUs would be better) such as Povray, PRP and large scale document indexing.

My beef is not with Microsoft so much as the PC sellers (although I'm sure MS has them in an arm lock).

Just because most people what to play games on them under Windows doesn't mean everyone should be forced to purchase one with Windows. I don't think that is unr

Whether he likes it or not? Knowing the buggy and insecure nature of Windows, what sensible person would be happy with what you describe?

You'd be suprised. Though i'm sure you'd never believe it, it's quite possible to get a Windows box secured and plenty stable for normal use. The XP Pro box i'm typing this on now (for example) has been up for about a few months straight, with the last reboot being because Winamp was having some odd issues. If you get all the security patches, run regular virus/adware sc

You know, I bet they don't even expect anyone to buy it. This is just their flagship model, in the same way car companies do double-figure production runs of crazy supercars. It's not for profit - it's for kudos and profile raising.